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Why You’ll Love My Recipe

Cozy, comforting, and easy to whip up in a flash, banana bread is one of my favorite bakes! Adding chocolate chips and sour cream to the mix make this loaf extra rich and perfect for serving alongside tea or coffee!

This is the BEST sour cream banana bread recipe—it’s moist, decadent and loaded with chocolate chips! The sour cream adds a lovely tang and makes a loaf of incredibly moist banana bread, not to mention uses up your freezer bananas!

If you don’t have sour cream, you can make my buttermilk banana bread or one of my favorite concoctions, my blueberry banana bread! It’s the craziest combination but it WORKS! I also have an entire category of quick loaf bread recipes if you’re looking for banana bread alternatives!

Slices of Chocolate Chip Sour Cream Banana Bread on Cooling Rack

Karlynn’s Recipe Notes

Skill Level: This recipe is easy to make, perfect for an afternoon break!
Total Time: You can have your banana bread ready in 1 hour and 10 minutes.
Variations: Don’t let the loaf pan keep you down! If you want a more portable snack, but check for doneness using a toothpick or cake tester at around the 15 minute mark!
Tools For This Recipe: You will need a 9×5 loaf pan, mixing bowls, an electric hand mixer (to make creaming the butter and sugar together easy), and a cooling rack to make this recipe! If you bake a lot and don’t want to use up a million toothpicks, consider buying yourself a cake tester!

Close up Slices of Chocolate Chip Sour Cream Banana Bread on Cooling Rack

What You’ll Need for Ingredients

Bananas: You’ll need 3 to 4 medium-sized bananas for this recipe, so it’s a fantastic way to use up a bunch that’s starting to go south! I keep a stash of bananas that are going a little too soft in the freezer so I don’t have to feel pressured to use them the second they start to show their age!

Sour Cream: The sour cream in this recipe makes for a wetter batter, but a moist and tender loaf! Karlynn’s Tip: For a higher protein option, you could substitute the sour cream for Greek yogurt!

Baking Soda and Baking Powder: The baking soda will react with the acids in the batter (from both the bananas and the sour cream) to make your loaf light and fluffy! Baking powder is double-acting, meaning that it adds rise when it first mixes with your wet ingredients and reacts again thanks to the heat of the oven. It also contributes to giving your final loaf that lovely golden brown color!

Chocolate Chips: I suggest using semi-sweet chocolate chips in this recipe, as semi-sweet chocolate provides a great balance of sweetness and richness! If you want to add a little something special, you could chop bars of semi-sweet chocolate into chunks to use instead of more uniform chips so your final loaf!

How to Make Chocolate Chip Sour Cream Banana Bread

This is a quick overview of the recipe. The full list of ingredients & complete step-by-step instructions are in the recipe card below.

Preheat your oven to 350°F and grease a 9×5 loaf pan.
In a large bowl, cream the butter and sugar together until smooth and fluffy. Add in the egg and beat until well incorporated. Then mix in the mashed bananas, sour cream, and vanilla.
In a separate bowl whisk together your dry ingredients, including the chocolate chips. Add the dry ingredients to the wet mixture and fold together gently until just combined.
Pour or spoon the batter into your prepared loaf pan and level the top carefully. Bake for 50-60 minutes, until a cake tester or toothpick comes out clean. Make sure to test different parts of the loaf! Remove from the oven and cool in the pan for 10 minutes before turning the loaf out onto a cooling rack.

Four Slices of Chocolate Chip Sour Cream Banana Breads

Karlynn’s Tips and Tricks for the Perfect Chocolate Chip Sour Cream Banana Bread

Problem Solving: If you want to make banana bread but your bananas just aren’t ripe enough, you can soften them up by baking them for 15-20 minutes at 300°F—don’t bother to peel them! Once the peels are totally brown, let them cool down and they’ll be the perfect texture! If you’re in a pinch, you can also give your unpeeled bananas a couple jabs with a fork and microwave them for 30 seconds to 1 minute. The goal is to make the fruit nice and soft so it mixes into your batter properly!

Avoid That Sinking Feeling: If your banana bread tends to sink in the middle, it might be because you’ve overmixed the batter or used a pan that was too small! Make sure to mix the dry ingredients into the wet by hand until just combined to keep gluten from developing, and check that your pan is a 9×5 loaf pan (which holds 1.25 pounds), not a 1 pound loaf pan, which looks similar but may overflow or lead to a sunken center!

Low and Slow: When you make a banana bread with a ton of moisture in the batter, you have to bake it longer and at a lower temperature than usual to make sure that it’s cooked all the way through. Check your loaf in multiple places for doneness at the end of the recommended bake time to make sure it’s totally cooked, and if you start to feel a little worried that it’s getting too brown, cover your loaf pan lightly with some aluminum foil.

Storage Instructions

Once your banana bread has cooled to room temperature, wrap it in plastic wrap or keep it in an airtight container at room temperature for up to 2 days.

Refrigerator: Your cooled banana bread can be kept in the fridge for up to 5 days, but make sure that you seal it up well to keep it from drying out!

Freezer: You can freeze your banana bread as a whole loaf or in slices in the freezer by transferring it into a freezer-safe zip top bag or airtight freezer safe container. It’ll keep in the deep freeze for up to 3 months. When you’re ready to eat it, you can either let it thaw in the fridge overnight, or at room temperature for a few hours.

More Delicious Banana Bread Recipes

My recipe for Banana Nut Bread is my #1 favorite banana bread recipe. Heavy, dense and loaded with walnuts and banana flavor, it’s just amazing!
For a real classic taste, give my mom’s Basic Banana Bread a try! She made it all the time when I was growing up. So good!
My Healthy Banana Bread is made with whole wheat flour, no oil, hemp hearts, and honey as a sweetener, but it tastes so good you’ll barely notice that it’s better for you!
And if you’re a fan of chocolate and bananas but don’t want to go the extra mile with sour cream, you can always try my regular Chocolate Chip Banana Bread recipe. Classic and decadent!

If there is one type of recipe I have a ton of here on The Kitchen Magpie, it’s banana bread recipes! I love banana bread so much that I can’t resist making a loaf even when there’s a heat warning—thank goodness for my countertop oven!

Give this banana bread recipe a try and let me know how it goes for you in the comments below!

Happy Baking!

Karlynn

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